Brandon Black reardencode

May 22, 2024 | bitcoinmagazine.com | Brandon Black reardencode |Brandon Black

IntroductionYou may have heard about re-enabling OP_CAT as a potential upgrade for bitcoin's script language. Depending on where you get your news OP_CAT has been called "only 10 lines of code", "the best way to enable experimentation with covenants", "too powerful", "dangerous and leading to miner centralization", or "guaranteed to lead to a contentious soft fork". I'm going to make the case that all of these perspectives are mistaken.

Dec 18, 2023 | bitcoinmagazine.com | Brandon Black |Output Bytes |Brandon Black reardencode

This year has seen a massive upswing in demand for the limited space available within bitcoin blocks, leading to higher fees for on chain transactions. Much of the demand is for transactions revealing inscriptions. The contents of these inscriptions are revealed as part of the witness data1 of a bitcoin transaction. This witness data1 is discounted to one quarter the cost of other transaction data. Why are we giving these inscriptions a discount? Should we soft-fork out the witness discount?